Introduction
Coverture was a device in English common law. Under its terms, married women and children could not exercise property rights independently of their husbands and fathers. Feminist historians of the British Isles have considerably revised the initial impression of powerlessness that coverture implies. One group suggests that common law was not the only source of reasoning around the property claims of married women; ecclesiastical law as well as equity courts gave very different decisions on married women's property claims. Formal denials in common law were thus ignored or bypassed by other legal authority.Footnote 1 A second group, while characterizing coverture as a ‘legal fiction’, has argued that unmarried and single women effected the greater sophistication of fiscal forms, mercantile lending, credit, and the pooling of capital for technological and industrial developments in eighteenth-century England.Footnote 2 Both groups of historians have prioritized the social histories of practice over legal principles in recovering a broader history of women's wealth in the British Isles. This deserves at least as rigorous an exploration in the British colony in India—one that has not yet been undertaken by feminist legal historians from the British Isles nor by post-colonial historians of eighteenth-century commerce in the larger Indian Ocean world. While the former have overlooked the colonial enactments of British laws regarding Indian women in the study of British capitalism, the majority of historians of Indian mercantile lineages and firms have remained silent about those customary practices that gendered such markets and businesses.Footnote 3
The few scholars who have considered women's economic investments in the subcontinent between the eighth and the sixteenth centuries have demonstrated that the fixity of heterosexual marriage was unnecessary for medieval Indian women's investment of wealth in infrastructural buildings such as temples, shrines, monasteries, and water-storage utilities.Footnote 4 Nor was medieval marriage a bar to such investments.Footnote 5 Construction activities acted in both cases as a statement of the women's social lineages (of husbands and parents) or as statements of their ritual-spiritual affiliations with monastically organized teachers (religious lineage). In both cases, women's investments transformed agriculture and enabled the formation of lineages of experts as well as the settlement of occupational groups.Footnote 6 All of these processes were even more enhanced from the late sixteenth century onwards under the aegis of Mughal imperial and provincial administrative households. Not only did imperial mothers and consorts own seafaring ships but they also built gated inns (caravanserais) that collected tolls on the inland and river routes of northern India.Footnote 7 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, never-married Mughal daughters, reigning queens as well as a widowed wet-nurse used their wealth to sponsor markets as well as mosques. As these examples show, even pious construction was yoked to commerce: the buildings and their managerial bureaucracies were sustained by rents from commercial shops, imposts, and tolls on goods (sai’r) collected on the roads, at river and sea-ports, and in markets (bazars, ganjs, haats) by assignees.Footnote 8 When the sums assigned had cash values, they were referred to as madad-i-ma‘ash (in Mughal Persian), and when buildings and persons were endowed with shares of harvests, fields, and quarries, they were often referred to as aimah. In technical terms of shari‘at, the setting aside of funds and fields from ordinary circulation was called a waqf (singular; awqaf plural). The historical evidence from the subcontinent suggests the longevity of similar practices and institutions both antecedent to, and then imbricated in, the establishment of formal judicial institutions.
Other scholars studying the eighteenth to twentieth centuries have also suggested that women's pious involvement in construction projects may have remained linked to internal commerce in the subcontinent.Footnote 9 Some among them highlight the fluid forms of heterosexual cohabitation (‘garlanding marriage’, ‘courtship’) that allowed women's capital to be deployed in the transformation of northern Indian male bankers and mercantile monastics (Saiva Gosvami) into sedentarized firms with permanent funds. If hetero-normative partnerships of women and (post-bhakti) monks survived into the nineteenth century, then what happened to such partnerships in eastern India? What happened to the women's buildings? Were they always in plain sight, and simply ignored by scholars of the twentieth century? Scholars of similar buildings in Banaras have suggested that the invisibility of such construction was quite literally the effect of the location of the ‘camera’ on top of these buildings.Footnote 10
This article attempts to extend this discussion by widening the lens. It will look not only at the buildings sponsored by women but explore the larger invisibility of female patrons-as-economic agents in the scholarship of the history of late Mughal and early colonial Bengal. Though it will use corroborative evidence from major Mughal and Muslim households in Mughal Bengal, the main focus of this article is on Hindu wives and widows. Its second goal is to expand the category of the ‘hetero-normative’ by highlighting economic partnerships between widowed female estate-holders and managers (zamindars) and male monastics. The first half of the article will outline the methodological obstacles that prevented previous scholars from seeing the residential buildings and shops attached to pious construction projects. The second half of the article will reinterpret the contours of Hindu widows’ expenditures in the shaping of translocal flows of funds and goods in the eighteenth century, and suggest the largely secular contexts in which these flows were disrupted and the women-centred networks and buildings rendered invisible.
Methodological difficulties: categories, disciplines, and translation
By and large, scholarly reticence about the significance of women's investment in construction activities might be understood in terms of conceptual and disciplinary binds, on the one hand, and flawed translations, on the other. One of the more prohibitive of conceptual difficulties, as Orr has noted, was the divorce between religious studies and economics that occurred from the late eighteenth century onwards and shaped the study of Hinduism. Conducted in the very conditions in which lineages of scholars were slowly losing their livelihoods in local temple and mosque-based economies, the limitation of studies of Hindu ‘religion’ to textual studies of dharmasastra made it possible for the emergence of a Weberian understanding of Hinduism as an ‘other-worldly’ religion. This was dampening in terms of research, especially on categories of wealth. As modern scholars of Hindu dharmasastra have argued, the definition of wealth and property was itself declared to be part of the procedure (vyavahara) of resolving disputes.Footnote 11 From the second century CE, experts who knew Sanskrit (pandits) had broadly accepted 18 aspects of social life prone to disputation (vivada in Sanskrit), but the resolution of such disputes tended to be through locality-informed procedures (vyavahara). Moreover, all property holding was praiseworthy since it enabled the performance of all duties and obligations (dharma) incidental to social-ritual status (varna-jati rank), mainly the obligation of maintaining the household. As a result, all kinds of moveable and immoveable goods were held as property by both monastic corporations and lay households; and both corporations of nuns and lay female householders used and owned property.Footnote 12 By allowing the study of these texts to be separated from their concerns with ‘this-worldly’ gains, scholars disabled themselves from understanding the ways in which text-based practices—such as dana (or meritorious gift-giving) and, by extension, Quranic zakat (mandated giving from one's income) and sadqa (additional voluntary gift)—had allowed pious women to shape the commercial lives of their times.
A second conceptual difficulty was the nationalist and post-nationalist separation of Hindu from Muslim piety. This enabled scholars to neglect the considerable interpenetration of monastic commerce from the earlier centuries and its continuance in later periods. For instance, epigraphic charters from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries established that temple managers leased out divinely held properties in eastern India on commercial leases.Footnote 13 These charters confirmed the non-sectarian nature of sponsorship by merchants. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Turko-Afghan sultans employed members of particular Vaisnava and Saiva monastic lineages such as the Smarta Hindu Brahmans (including the teacher, or acharya, Vachaspati Misra) as well as founders of the Vaisnava cult of a teacher, Chaitanya (such as Rupa and Sanatan Gosvami).Footnote 14 Some among the Hindus employed in these administrations also bequeathed their offices to male kinsmen in lineages of service: Mukundadasa served as the court physician of the ruler, Ala al-Din Husain Shah (r. 1498–1510), while his father Narayandasa had served an earlier sultan, Ruknuddin Barbak I (r. 1460–1474). Thus Hindu men belonging in dual lineages of ritual initiation (as Vaisnava, Saiva, Tantric) and political households remained inserted in the monastic commercial networks that spread out between China and Sri Lanka in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries.Footnote 15 An interconnected Hindu bureaucracy serving formally Muslim (Shi‘a, Sunni, Mongol and Turko-Afghan) soldiers and statesmen retained economic privileges within this service to a non-sectarian patron. In the fifteenth century, favoured members of the monastic literati in Bengal and Assam (Kamrup) such as Srikanta, the brother-in-law of the Vaisnava leader, Sanatan Gosvami, was assigned the work of purchasing horses by Husain Shah from the horse-trading networks that ran between the Tibetan Himalayas to the Gangetic plains and foothills.
Although the particular sects making up each monastic-lay patron cluster changed in subsequent centuries, the pattern of interconnected Hindu (Khattri, Kayastha, and Brahman jati) lineages of service continued into the Mughal administration in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries as well.Footnote 16 Afghan and Mughal faujdars (military officers appointed by the emperor to superintend forts and armies) and zamindars (officers appointed to collect taxes from particular localities) alike gave plots of land and income from their own allotments of income both as permanent ‘gifts’ and as ‘rewards’ to such scribes from clerical lineages for services rendered. Such grants bore witness to the continued Mughal dependence on non-Muslim scribal and monastic lineages in eastern India. For instance, a grant from 1644 CE, bearing the seal of a Mirza Jan Beg as well as that of a Hindu business agent (gomastah) and secretary (naib) of the local Mughal tax-collector, gave a line of (Brahman) ‘Bhattas’ substantial plots of land in Midnapur.Footnote 17 It was not a coincidence that Mughal dominion in northern India revitalized much older mercantile and soldiering Hindu monastic lineages, such as the Vaisnava Ramanandi as well as the Saiva (Dasnami) gosains by these means.Footnote 18
For the purposes of this article, such revitalization also meant the growth of interconnected scribal bureaucracies, creators both of multilingual poetry and of multilingual legal and administrative documents (charters, receipts, sale certificates, permits, accounts, letters). Scholars of poetry have attended to the multilingual literary output that characterized Mughal administration.Footnote 19 Here we will turn our attention instead to the multingual administrative documents produced at the same time. They establish even more securely the amalgam of interpenetrated customary practices that shaped commercial affairs and property transactions of the same centuries.Footnote 20 Deeds that were written out in a mid-eighteenth-century Gaudiya Bengali script fluently combined Bengali, Persian, and Hindustani lexicons. Thus sanad-i-bangla (a charter in the Bengali language), farman-i-farsi (an imperial order in the Persian language), harf nagri (in Nagri letters), dastkhat-i-Hindustani (signed in Hindustani writing), legal terminology such as waris sharif (respectable heirs) or administrative ones such as chhar-chitthi (letter acknowledging the remission of dues, or a release document) posed no problems for those who read, deciphered, and translated these documents, and wrote them out in Bengali script. Such an amalgam simply marked the requisite levels of polyglossia cultivated by local literati who dominated the structures of the local administration and dispute-resolution.
Administrative procedures in both civil (revenue-related) and criminal matters both accommodated and acknowledged the multilingual and interpenetrated practices of the region. In the 1660s, when a Mughal emperor sought to compile the resolutions of the qazis and juriconsults (muftis), he only consolidated a tradition of taking into account the practices of a majority of non-Muslim (that is, Buddhist, Jaina, and Hindu) populations.Footnote 21 ‘Old practice’ was explicitly pleaded by goddess-worshipping ‘Hindu priests’ in the Panjab Hills even as they sought to renew their claim to collect a pilgrim tax: and it was granted on those terms alone by the Mughal and Muslim governor of the Kangra fort.Footnote 22 In the period after 1765, when a ‘Hindu’ contractor and financier for the early English East India Company (henceforth the Company) government sought to enrich himself by disabling two elderly female estate-holders (zamindars), the grounds on which he based his claim was ‘established custom in these provinces, founded on a principle of benefit and security to Government’.Footnote 23 He did not cite any Hindu or Muslim legal text—either dharmasastra or shari‘at—in his attempt. The same concession to customary practice was made by the learned Shi‘i, Ali Ibrahim Khan, when he was appointed judge in Benares in 1786.Footnote 24 His court allowed judicial procedures (vyavahara in Sankrit) that included ‘divination’ proceedings such as ordeals. Given the priority of practices of dispute resolution and economic administration in the eighteenth century, the question remains: why has it been hard for economic historians to incorporate the customary practices of women's wealth-management into the story of the economic transition in the eighteenth century?
To some extent, their restraint might have been determined by their reading of vernacular and literary sources without prioritizing architectural records and measurements. Thus a significant economic historian of the transition studied the late eighteenth-century contests over bazars in eastern India but read narrative poetry or mangalkavya (in Bengali) without noticing the many instances of construction touched upon in each.Footnote 25 The theme of construction—of complex residential cum sacred sites within fortified cities—remained prominent in all eighteenth-century narrative poetry produced in Mughal Bengal. A dharmamangalkavya composed by Narsimha Basu in this century tied a queen's sponsorship of a dharma shrine to a contemporary maritime economy: the coffers of a fort were used to pay and feed the many masons, builders, and carpenters involved in the construction.Footnote 26 As if to mirror such poetry, other literary records describe women-sponsored construction in the eighteenth century.Footnote 27
Though eighteenth-century poets linked women to construction activities, twentieth-century historians may have been prevented from recognising this fact because of the entrenched divides between the disciplines of art history and economic history. Scholars on both sides of the divide, however, have paid for this division. As Sears has suggested, an earlier generation of art historians largely omitted the study of residential complexes (mathas, akharas) attached to ‘temples’ and ‘mosques’.Footnote 28 Monasteries, halls, assemblies, and warehouse facilities built for, and sometimes by, significant teachers (gurus), who were identified as repositories of vast ritual, medical, and spiritual knowledge, guides to their practice, and, over time, themselves manifestations of divinity and subjects of worship, were ignored by many twentieth-century scholars. This was then further compounded by the translation practices of others. For example, a compendium of epigraphic materials translated a variety of distinct Sanskrit terms—such as matha, mandapa, devakula, mandira—into the one and the same English word: ‘temple’.Footnote 29 Such translations permitted subsequent generations to overlook the complex military and mercantile functions and politics at each site. This is especially visible with complexes in modern west Bengal, such as Bishnupur. Women specifically named in the epigraphs as sponsors of buildings (called matha) on this site are simply invisible to modern official archaeologists.Footnote 30 On the other hand, literary scholars who correctly identify the non-Brahman women's wealth at this site remain unable to point to the economic and military implications of such investments by women.Footnote 31
This is only conceptually impoverishing if we concede that many such complexes were located at significant commercial routes and within fortified sites for a very long time between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. For instance, armies led by Mughal Rajput and Sufi commanders proceeded from the northern plains against their Afghan rivals in Orissa and Bengal, and found ‘Hindus’ in regions such as Bankura (and modern Bishnupur). One of these was the famous Pratapaditya of Jessore who had ‘Katky Brahmans’ as his spiritual guides and lived in a village of Bankura, where an exquisitely decorated (presumably terracotta) ‘bungalow was constructed as their temple’.Footnote 32 It is impossible to determine whether the term ‘kataky brahmans’ stood for men from Cuttack, Orissa or for Tantric Saiva militants; it is easier to understand that their ‘temples’ were also their residential quarters. Some of the walls of such encampments remained visible in the eighteenth century when Company officers described rice-fields of Bishnupur ‘enclosed within a deep ditch and bamboo hedge and surrounded entirely with thick woods . . . rimains [sic] of a small Brick Fort within the Ditch’.Footnote 33 Archaeologists photographed and described the fort, including its gun, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote 34 The 10-foot high stone chariot near the gateway of the fort was repaired as late as 1933.Footnote 35 Later archaeologists dated the water-bodies (bandhs) excavated outside the fort in what appears to be a double moat system of defence to the late seventeenth century (1657–1677).Footnote 36 But by the 1960s–1970s, art historians studying ‘temples’ at the same site overlooked the forts altogether, as they did all the other secular shelters, rest-houses and monasteries (mathas) attached to similar buildings in eastern India.Footnote 37 In the process, they erased the history of women's embeddedness in the economic and military networks of these landscapes. The next part of this article will focus on recovering an economic history, beginning with a different order of geography, and then go on to talk about women's activities in that devotional as well as commercial landscape.
Monastic geographicity, women's construction, and commercial partnerships in eastern India
Bernard Cohn argued long ago that monastic trading networks were vital all across northern India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote 38 He referred specifically to the Saiva monastic order of Dasnami gosains, some of whom were residential merchants, and others who were itinerants and mercenaries. Their residences were mathas (monasteries), scattered between sites in the Himalayas (such as at Joshimatha) and across Nepal, Bihar, and Bengal, and which stretched deep into the central Indian peninsula.Footnote 39 These monastic complexes constructed a social geography that, following van Spengen, I identify as ‘monastic geographicity’.Footnote 40 The term combines Braudel's notion of ‘geographicity’ in terms of town and routes, and extends it to incorporate the specificities of monastic traders across a variety of landscapes. The concept invokes a persistent mobility of people, commodities, and ideas in a complex system tethered to fortified residential monasteries. It thus gestures simultaneously at the architectural markers of stability—the residential complexes and monasteries—and the spatial extent of economic and intellectual-cultural circuits that constitute a ‘region’.
The patronage of both Hindu and Muslim women of such complexes constituted direct investments in the economic, military, and political aspects of ‘monastic geographicity’. Donating a monastery, or tax-exempt lands and workers thereto, meant that the service bureaucracies of both gods and men were housed. This provided returns in both the here and the hereafter. The buildings acted as nodes in far-flung networks of lay nomadic pastoralists, sedentary peasant households, residential novices, and ordained monks who together created and transmitted ideas and practices at or around the monasteries. This was especially visible with the ‘malla’ grants of mathas and shrines—buildings that enabled both temporary sedentarization and rhythms of seasonal mobility. As Gutschow argues with reference to epigraphic evidence from the Kathmandu valley, the term malla, which literally meant ‘wrestler’, was a title adopted by men.Footnote 41 Stone stele with malla succession lists established the governments of such men over a region that extended between trans-Himalayan Ladakh and eastern Nepal between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries.Footnote 42 These regions had solid roads and bridges, the planning and building of which archaeologists identified as key elements in a commercial empire built particularly on the exchange of wool and gold for grain and salt. The roads extended as far as China in the east and India to the south. This prior history may explain the incorporation of such groups into both the Sultanate and the Mughal imperium in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. An inscription dated Sakavda 1537 (1615 CE), which names Salim Shah Badshah (the Mughal emperor, Jahangir) and his subahdar (of Orissa), Raja Kalyan Malla, identifies a variety of skilled masons (mistri) who constructed a ‘performance hall’ (nat-mandir) attached to the temple of a goddess (Sri Mangala-thakurani) inside the fort (gadi/garh) of Sri Kasiadi, the seat (adhisthana) of a local leader (chaudhuri).Footnote 43 The inscription outlines the varieties of buildings attached to a shrine, locates them all within a fort, and ties the entire complex to a vast ‘monastic geographicity’ beyond.Footnote 44
Many of the shrines and monasteries attached to fortified complexes were sponsored by women. A woman identified as ‘the wife of Sri Raya’, for instance, donated an elegant matha (monastery) in the name of Siva.Footnote 45 In the seventeenth century, women identified especially as daughters, sisters, and wives of particular malla braves (vir) donated shrines and monasteries at various sites in Bankura and Midnapur.Footnote 46 These institutions linked diversified economies (of agro-pastoralists as well as merchants) with arid mountainous and riverine plains cultures across a monastically marked region. Widely dispersed sites, such as those in the Kathmandu valley, were connected to the salt-producing coastline under the command of the Jagannath temple (Puri, modern Orissa).Footnote 47 By investing in these symbols of architectural stability and social mobility in the intermediate regions of Bankura (western Bengal plains), malla women's sponsorship directly steered circuits of itinerants, goods, and services in which they specialized through markets in the tax-collecting jurisdictions of particular deities and their servants—the priests and abbots (mahants)—at both ends.
By the early eighteenth century, across all parts of Mughal Bengal and Bihar, the wives of Mughal Hindu governors exercised identical economic authority. This activity remained important in Midnapur, a region taken from Afghan authority in the late sixteenth century by Mughal-Rajput arms. Women's sponsorship of construction projects stabilized the Mughal administration in this newly annexed Mughal domain. A dedicatory epigraph identified a woman called Rama, ‘the wife of Govinda and daughter of Aditya’, as the sponsor of a well-constructed and adorned temple to Kali.Footnote 48 ‘Govinda’ was short for Govindaram, the deputy accountant general (naib qanungo) of the Mughal governor (nazim) of Bengal, Shuja al-Din Muhammad Khan, during 1727–39.Footnote 49 The wife of Govinda headed a group made up of a sculptor (bhaskara), draftsmen, decorators (anka), a steward (bhandari), a writer, a local military commander (senapati), the masons (mistri), architects, and builders—a set of skilled occupational and service corps—who joined with her in building and dedicating the shrine. Who were these workers? Had they come to the terrain as part of a royal woman's natal entourage, part of her ‘dower’, or were they long-settled residents in the region? While this is hard to answer, the inscription suggests the kinds of skilled workers that such a woman could both effectively draw upon and command in the process of construction. Such command in turn either sustained or enhanced the military and commercial capabilities of particular sites, significant in what was, at the time, a ‘borderland’ terrain with Afghan-Rajput regimes. Similar practices in other ‘borderlands’ achieved similar results, as in Barddhaman (old English, ‘Burdwan’ in western Bengal).Footnote 50 In such instances, women's sponsorship in fact preceded that of the local Mughal administrators. The grant by a ‘wife of Govinda’ preceded one dated 1734 (1141 VS), in which a zamindar of Kashijora (Midnapur), gave 85 bigahs (approximately 28-odd acres) of tax-exempt land as a gift to a Mallik Magan Khan for establishing a masjid and khanqah (residence of a Sufi pir) in the pargana.Footnote 51 Six years later, in 1740 (1147 VS) the successor zamindar, Naranarayan, gave another plot of land in the same pargana to another Muslim shaykh, Abu Shobhan, as a madad-i-ma’ash.Footnote 52 Very shortly afterwards, the income from this fertile region was demanded as chauth by Maratha sardars such as Januji Bhonsle.
Women's sponsorship extended to the excavation of ponds. This was simultaneously a military investment in the life of the fort as it was a ‘gift’ of water that quenched travellers’ thirst, an act of benevolence with invisible cosmological benefits. These excavated ponds and tanks, or restored dried-out tanks, also connected distant fortified temples to each other, as, for instance, the temples of Barddhaman to those of Orissa. For instance, there was a tank known as the ‘Rani Talao’ on the road from Balasore (Orissa) to the temple of Jagannath at Puri. In mid-eighteenth century, when the Company trader-cum-official, Vansittart, travelled on this road, he was told that the ‘rani’ was the grandmother of the zamindar of Burdwan, Tilak Chandra, who had gone on a pilgrimage by that route.Footnote 53 Finding that her attendants suffered for want of potable water between Shuru and Bhadrak, she sent money from Burdwan on her return there. Eventually, though, the presence of water within a fort or in its proximity also determined the extent of the fields and crops that could be cultivated, and the size and complexity of the human and animal populations a fortified capital and settlement could sustain. A gift of water by a devout woman was in fact a direct investment in the life sustainable within the fort itself.Footnote 54
Finally, investments in the construction of residential complexes by women were significant because they housed mercantile monastic and soldiering ascetic lineages from very remote places across the subcontinent. They could only be induced to settle within a given jurisdiction if they were guaranteed substantial incomes, exemptions from taxation, and other kinds of privileges. For instance, the same senior Vaisnava woman who financed wells and temples belonged in a household of Panjabi Hindu Khatri zamindars of old Burdwan, which hired cavalry (sawar) and soldiers (paiks) from easternmost Himalayan lineages, referred to in old English records as ‘Meckely Pikes’.Footnote 55 The ‘Raja of Meckely’ in the mid-eighteenth century, a Vaisnava monk-guru, Jai Simha, assumed command of the capital and fort of Manipur, and despatched his own envoy, a ‘Hurrydass Gussein’ (Haridas Gosain), to Chittagong to negotiate with Verlest to secure the Company's assistance in recovering his lands from Buddhist Burmese occupation.Footnote 56 The monastic (gosain) had up-to-the minute information on the situation of various governments,
down to the southern parts of Pegu, whither he has been several times and gives me great encouragement for a trade as far as China; assuring me that when the Meckleyans and Burmahs are upon amicable terms, the China merchants bring their goods down as far as Moneypore, in any quantities they find a market for.Footnote 57
Obviously, Mughal Hindu women's investments in matha and tanks tied them to the monastic merchants and markets in ways already modelled by Mughal Muslim women's pious awqaf. Famous among these in the eighteenth century was the power-broker, Munni Begam, chief consort and relict of the Nawab Nazim of Bengal after 1765, Mir Ja‘far. Munni Begam established many discrete markets in the vicinity of Murshidabad. But especially dear to her was the masjid and naubatkhana she had built at a site called the Chauk.Footnote 58 At the foot and round the side of the masjid, she had built several shops, the receipts from which, together with the income from other markets and shops, maintained the caretaker of the mosque (mutawalli), khatib, qaris, travellers, and the bureaucracy (amala) of the entire commercial establishment.Footnote 59 Such a pious commercial complex was also part of a larger Shi‘a and Sufi monastic geography that tied together commercial, devotional, and information networks. Female sponsors such as Munni Begam thus tried to appoint favoured nominees to the offices of customs-collectors at important commercial crossroads and sites. From these men, in turn, came the opportunity to reinvest the money in other expanding markets and or hire other kinds of services. Munni Begam thus recommended that the office of the superintendent (mutawalli) of the shrine of Hazrat Shah Jalal (in Pandua, Malda) be given to her nominee, Munshi Mir Sadr al-Din.Footnote 60
By sponsoring these appointees, elderly propertied women enacted a form of patronage that was also simultaneously a form of economic partnership akin to the commenda and authorized by Islamic law.Footnote 61 In this form of partnership, one party supplied capital, the other services. Since both Maliki and Hanafi law valued labour, especially skilled labour, as a valid form of investment, partnerships in which one party supplied skilled labour and the other supplied commodities and cash were especially conducive to the widowed female estate-holders in Mughal Bengal. Therefore, exactly like Munni Begam, female Mughal Hindu zamindars, such as the Brahman Rani Bhavani in Rajshahi, Rani Saraswati in Dinajpur, or the non-Brahman junior rani in Burdwan fought hard to retain control over the appointment of various skilled men—‘Brahmans’—in significant roles in their own zamindari offices. Very often, especially in the Hindu households, such men were either the priests who performed daily rituals in the household (purohits) or were themselves the teachers (gurus) of the women. At least one of these relationships is suggested by Company records of a ‘Pran Chakrabarti’ or ‘Chand Chakrabarti’, who worked for the widow who headed the dominant household in Rajshahi, Bhavani.Footnote 62 Such ‘Brahmans’, possessors of significant accounting, literary, and diplomatic epistolary skills and holders of substantial estates as a result, also belonged in a fairly widespread network of disciples and teachers. This may have been one of the reasons that enabled them to broker deals with other financial service-providers in the region.
Members of such extended monastic and ritual-performing lineages commanded the grain, salt, labours, and effects of the cultivators and their representatives. Donations and contributions by the latter enabled the mahantas (heads of a monastic lineage) to make substantial loans of money to a range of tax-paying zamindars at very high rates of interest.Footnote 63 Financier gosains in particular were described by a Maratha administrator of Orissa as a ‘banking business in this part of the country for several generations’.Footnote 64 The mahantas loaned money that was the ‘joint property’—corporate wealth—of themselves, their dependants, and lay adherents. The bond or acknowledgements were taken from the debtors (often substantial zamindar or chaudhuri of the district) in the name of one person in order to obviate keeping multiple accounts. Hence the phenomena of single names, normally heads of lineages, who held massive segments of lands in their names when the zamindars defaulted on the repayment of these loans.
A conflict that began during the late Mughal regime of tax collection and came to the notice of the Company only much later provides a glimpse of the difficulties of the moneylending business of these monastics. Two men called ‘Boodeguir’ and ‘Dean Guir’ [Buddhagiri, Dhyangiri] described as ‘inhabitants of Gopalpur’ (possibly in Malda, Indian Bengal) petitioned that in 1173 BS (or 1766 CE) the agent (vakil) of the zamindar of Hatinda (also in modern Malda) had asked for a loan of 1,500 rupees on behalf of his employer.Footnote 65 The Giris comprised one of the branches of the Saiva monastic lineages that maintained residential complexes. They had put together the sum from the earnings and savings of four or five more members of the brotherhood, and had secured a bond written in the name of one of their co-parceners, ‘Noaul Guir’ (Nawalgiri). A month later, the zamindar himself visited the lenders to plead for another loan, this time of 5,000 rupees, with which to pay his shroff (banker). This time the Giris loaned him 3,001 rupees worth of shawls, and the rest in ready money, and took a bond for 5,001 rupees in the name of Buddhagiri and Durlabhgiri which was to be payable within a month. The zamindar defaulted on all his repayments; the lenders—the gosains—asked the Company's official tax collector to enforce the bond. Though the Supreme Court in Calcutta had decided in favour of the gosains, the defaulting zamindar continued to evade repayment. He implied instead that the gosains could recover their money directly themselves because at least some of them were already functionaries of local tax-collecting administrations. Thus he pointed to a moneylending gosain, Purushottamgiri, who had been appointed to the office of the waddadar (guarantor of tax collection) of the parganah. When the collections fell short, he went to ‘his own house at Gopalpur’ with the zamindar's agent, took 1,500 rupees from the other inhabitants, and made the agent write a bond in the name of his nephew, Nawalgiri. The sum was paid to the authorities at Rajmahal (one of the centres of Mughal Nawabi administration).
Though eighteenth-century officials of the Company used generic terms for such monastic commercial corporations (sannyasis when Hindu and ‘fakeers’ [faqirs] when identifiably Sufi), their reports outlined the ways in which monastic creditors collected the returns on their loans in the appropriate seasons. For instance, after the Company expedition to Kuch Bihar (1772) ousted Tibetan Buddhist monastic authority from the region and handed over the estates to their favoured nominee, the Nazir Deo, a British tax collector reported that a corporation of ‘sunnassies’ arrived at Silberris (northern Bengal) with horses and bullocks laden with ammunition, and negotiated with local chaudhuris to be paid 1,200 rupees. Once the money was sent to them, they retreated quietly and went on to the next market town, Sibganj.Footnote 66 Contrary to the later representation of these payments as ‘extortion’ and ‘plunder’, nothing of the early descriptions suggests that these men were anything but monastic lenders. Only after relations between them and their clients were reconstituted was the earlier repayment of loans treated as ‘plunder’ by officials. For instance, in Kuch Bihar, the earliest demand that a Company official made on the ally was the dismissal of the sannyasi corps; only after this could the Company set about collecting the 50,000 rupees it had secured by treaty.Footnote 67 The dismissed monastic bankers thought differently. The official Company reports thereafter are ripe with complaints that the sannyasis arrived at Govindganj and ‘extorted’ 3,000 rupees from the treasury.Footnote 68 The reality was that the payments were due on older loans, such as those made to the revenue farmers in the districts of Rangpur, Dinajpur, and Rajshahi. Officials at these places reported that the ‘Naga senassies came at the end of the month of Magh’ and took what was the instalment of taxes (kist) payable for that season.Footnote 69 In the Gregorian calendar, the end of Magh was mid-February, the end of winter harvesting and the season in which traders from the mountains began to wind up shops on the plains, clear pending dues and payments, close accounts, and prepare to return to the mountains before the onset of steamy, hot weather on the plains. It is likely that the various lineages of monastic merchants and militant moneylenders were collecting what they were owed for that year. Thus in the same season, from nearby Boalia (a major trading market in Rajshahi) another Company collector wrote of how the ‘sanassee fakeers’ had recently surrounded the English Factory and taken 3,000 Rupees from a Mr Burrell.Footnote 70
Such structures of monastic moneylending may explain not only the ability of the monastic residential sites to function as ‘banks’ but also the partnerships between tax-paying zamindari widows and significant males who were members of monastic lineages in the eighteenth century. To fund one Gosvami was to plug into the entire range of Gosvami-controlled entrepôts across the subcontinent, as well as into the affiliated entrepôts and labourers alongside them. This pattern is most directly suggested by the records of an estate managed by a Brahman Hindu widow called Janaki. She had been married to Anandalal Upadhyaya, the son of a (kanaujiya) Brahman from northern India, Sukhlal Upadhyaya, who had consolidated a zamindari in Mahishadal (Midnapur) in the 1760s out of many parcels of lands given solely for the subsistence of Brahmans (brahmottar).Footnote 71 Sometime between 1766 and 1769, Anandlal died. His widow, Janaki, first secured the support of an important monastic figure called Nittanund Gosain, to whom she issued a substantial cash pension.Footnote 72 He was about 28 years old in 1769. Such a man was both able-bodied and mobile, and also connected to other gosain networks. He was also the source of a cash loan of Rs 45,000 taken by Janaki.Footnote 73 This Brahman widow then loaned this money to another failing neighbour, the man who held the fort of Mainagarh. She made the loan just when the estates of his fort were on the verge of being sold for arrears of taxes levied by the Company. In exchange, Janaki acquired a bond on the Maina lands.Footnote 74 Apparently, this was a purely commercial venture, expected to recover money on interest, since she spent the better part of 1798–1804 recovering a sum of Rs 51,225–12–3 from the household at Maina.Footnote 75 Here then was a widow of a Brahman lineage and zamindari in Bengal both intimately connected to a monastic lineage and, likely through it, to a moneylending enterprise and land management.
The existence of such monastic moneylending networks may have been a sign of increasing specialization in the moneylending sector in a world without centralized banks. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there had developed a well-established business comprising the Mughal governors’ moneylenders (the sarrafs or shroffs).Footnote 76 If some of these monastic moneylenders had been assimilated into the local official bureaucracy of tax collection (as with the Giri waddadar and the gosain above), their local authority to function as a parallel line of credit had only been enhanced in the eighteenth century. Records of estates held by women in the eighteenth century suggest this fairly strongly. Janaki may not have been alone. Bhavani, the widow of the Mughal zamindar of Rajshahi, Ramakanta Rai, behaved in a similar fashion. From a list of 22 mahantas who successfully documented their claims to receive varying sums of cash from the tax collection of Natore, Rajshahi, in the 1790s, 16 claimed to have been settled by Ramakanta, and six owed their settlement in the region to the widow. Furthermore, this Brahman widow also had extensive financial dealings with the faqirs whose main residential lodges (akharas) were in the Gangetic plains further west, and through them, to Ajmer and beyond. When the Company dislodged Bhavani's authority from the zamindari, for instance, they found they had to confront an entourage of about seven hundred faqirs, led by Shah Majnu, who visited Lashkarpur, a district in Bhavani's jurisdiction and estate, to collect the ‘debt of 1500 rupees’ due from the deposed zamindar.Footnote 77 Majnu, it should be remembered, had his chief hospice-cum-residence (khanqah) at a place called ‘Muckumpore beyond Banaras’ by an English officer.Footnote 78 It is likely that this was the same site that a Dutch trader in the seventeenth century had called ‘Makanpur, 70 kos from Agra on the eastern road’.Footnote 79 It was the mazhar of Pir Shah Madar, said to possess many gifts and wield many powers. The annual pilgrimage to this site in February coincided with an enormous fair—a convergence of big and small markets even in the seventeenth century. But in the eighteenth-century record connected to this widow, what is striking is that the Madari brotherhood had travelled in the opposite direction in this sacred month of February. Was this because they had to collect their dues from the female and Brahman Hindu zamindar, or had they merely visited to collect their regular ‘donation’ from her?
While little evidence of the goods that were traded between members of the older Sufi lineages and the female zamindars survives, there is much greater evidence of such trade and marketing contracts between the Hindu monastic lineages and the female zamindars. Previous studies have highlighted monastic investments in the silk trade in the eighteenth century. I will briefly touch on the parallel trade network in salt, produced in the coastal estates such as those Janaki managed. Her signature is on many documents related to the production of salt and its trade from Mahisadal in the eighteenth century. In one year alone, she signed receipts at varying rates with at least five different contractors for the delivery of salt.Footnote 80 This trade in salt was important for the plural symbolic use and exchange values that had developed in the single commodity market by the eighteenth century. Sudipta Sen highlights the symbolic value of salt, which, along with betel and tobacco, were part of the Nawabi ‘merchandise of honor, objects endowed with distinctive value and signs of the rulers’ substantive authority’ prior to 1765.Footnote 81 To partake of someone's salt was to have pledged one's allegiance to that person. Betraying such a person was a grave misdemeanour, an insult to the benefactor's salt (namak-harami). Furthermore, as salt production itself was extremely difficult, with long hours spent in the sun tending to tidal deposits in the salt wells, it had become a nearly semi-precious commodity for the Mughals, who distributed salt among troops and camp followers during campaigns as part of this enhanced message that salt carried.
But this was not all. If the political value of salt was an indicator, then Janaki's ‘salt eaters’ included many of the monastic males we have been discussing above. In the official records, they appear as ‘Brahmans’, a catch-all term in English that obscures the stratification and diversity of this group of skilled men. A petition written by 25 such Brahmans claimed that from the 1720s, ‘for above fifty years past, a charitable donation of salt’ had supported them, their several religious functions, and their families.Footnote 82 As this petition clarifies, goods of symbolic value also had use-value and exchange-value, depending on the particular status of the recipient of salt. A mere ‘gift’ of salt could not have sustained ‘families’ or ‘religious functions’ without being itself a commodity for exchange against other goods and services, or whatever counted as the currency of the realm. Salt was thus already an important commodity in internal trade by the mid-eighteenth century; since its large-scale transfer could only be organized by the well-off, Mughal provincial administrators reserved such salt trades for ‘internal’ trading-banking groups who could in turn be taxed appropriately. Salt was an extremely lucrative good for all merchants to trade in. This is reflected in the amounts claimed as ‘donations’ of salt by Janaki's ‘Brahman’ dependants. The monastic lodge (akhara) of Baba Mastoram claimed that it received 813 maunds (nearly 27,000 kilograms) of salt, while Kishoridas Bairagi claimed 480 maunds (roughly 16,000 kilograms). These individual sums made up a total of 4,000 maunds that comprised ‘charitable donations’ in Mahisadal alone; another 7,798 maunds of salt were kept aside for the same purposes in Hijli, another estate of the same tax-paying district of Hughli.Footnote 83 Obviously, these accumulations would have warranted substantial storage centres, as well as access to shops, weights and measures, and related access to other goods and services within the region. It is likely that these enclosures were those that the women had had constructed. It was to these enclosures that men from a wide variety of places came in order to exchange their goods for salt. Thus both small, mobile, and seasonal markets could exist alongside the more permanent markets attached to shrines, mosques, and mathas, and women could patronize both kinds of markets.Footnote 84
Multiple hetero-normative partnerships: rivals within, trusted strangers without
A comparison with the social and legal histories of propertied women in the British Isles at this point would suggest parities in the way in which widows were allowed to control property in both hemispheres. The differences between these women lay elsewhere. In the Indian subcontinent, far more than in the British Isles, there were many more widows than there were spinsters. Marriage was a universal expectation across all caste and class groups: polygyny was expected of the powerful and the propertied. In the latter groups, therefore, widowhood was experienced by both the daughters and sisters of one man and his multiple wives in a single generation. For instance, when the male zamindar of Burdwan, Tilakchand, died, he left behind five consorts and one sister all of whom were expected to share as co-parcenaries in the rent income of particular villages.Footnote 85 Nor was this limited to a Vaisnava household. It was equally true of a Sufi Afghan household at Birbhum, where sisters and daughters were counted alongside wives in sharing the income of estates.Footnote 86 In disputes around the inheritance of property in such households, factions formed around widowed daughters and sisters’ inheritance claims, distinct from those around the widowed consorts of dead brothers and uncles.Footnote 87 Age-based seniority among widowed consorts also remained a source of tension when appointing managers to the administration of property.Footnote 88
In the best situations, widowed wives and widowed sisters worked out compromises in the management of what was effectively joint property and income, arrangements that were implemented by the monastic men each of them was in partnership with. It is worth noting, at least for the early years of Company government, neither set of widows (nor their appointed male scribes, the vakils) cited principles of Islamic or Hindu laws as grounds for such co-proprietorship. When a decree of this or that tribunal was attached to a case, it often represented the final step in a process. For instance, in North Bengal, in 1740, at a place called Tahirpur (Rajshahi, modern Bangladesh), the Nawab Alivardi Khan had issued an order (sanad) authorising a Raghavendranarain Chaudhuri to collect and enjoy the income of a 6-as share of Tahirpur.Footnote 89 In 1753, this man's wife, Sarasvati, secured a Bengali-language deed of permission (Ijazatnama) from her husband, enjoining her to adopt a son if he should die without having adopted one himself. Shortly afterwards, he died. Three years later, another Bengali-language deed (subahnama) with the signature of the dead man's paternal aunt, Rani Lakkhi, addressed to Sarasvati, recommended that since both women were joint proprietors of the estate, it should be renamed Lakkhi-Sarasvati, and the adopted boy succeed to this renamed estate (therefore both as his mother's and grand-aunt's heir). Only after this was a declaration of ‘Hindu law’ (patta panditan) secured from the (Brahman) pandits to publish the fact. An incredulous Company tax collector sent clerks from his office to interview the paternal aunt (Rani Lakkhi). The clerks found that she lived in the ‘house of her guru at Kasimbazar’. In the presence of a near relative of her guru, which sanctified her testimony as though it were given on oath, she confirmed that she had indeed signed the documents herself, and that the boy had been adopted and had succeeded to both his dead parents and to her. The elder widow's guru may have had an indirect role in arranging this compromise; if income from these estates was also used to subsidise the monastic lineage in question, he certainly would have had a vested interest in letting the other claimants in such income—other Brahmans, scribes, functionaries—know about this resolution.
However, where such compromises failed, elderly propertied widows perhaps needed to rely more heavily on monastic networks. These networks, almost inevitably, were made up of men (and women) who were non-kin of the widows who adhered to them. Many widows managing entire Mughal estates in the eighteenth century appear to have been especially reliant on such non-kin groups for a major resource: credit, which was a long-term affair and required an ongoing, long-term, and long-distance ‘trust’. The existence of trust presumed upon a social relationship in which people would be willing to place ‘valued outcomes at risk’.Footnote 90 Long-distance enterprises, especially of the kind that were spread out in the monastic geographic order referred to earlier, or in seasonally grown and exchanged goods, required reinvestments of earnings and profits over a long time. Both long-distance and long-term trade depended on the functioning of trust-based networks. For the widows who had to rely on them, the immediate question was one of generating and sustaining this trust between their own management and the long-distance financial networks.
How did they make it happen? This was where such widows’ investments in the ritualized performances that structured the itinerancy and life stages of monastic merchants played a critical role. For instance, the zamindari account books of Janaki's estates establish a direct connection between a widow's ‘customary’ sponsorship and the ritual behaviours and the economic geographies of monastic lineages that connected a small place in Bengal, Mahishadal, to a large Bay of Bengal region at one end, and a Himalayan foothill on the other. For instance, Janaki's estate in Mahishadal spent a total of 75,000 rupees in 1773.Footnote 91 One half of this sum was spent on recurring items or perennial expenses.Footnote 92 Among these recurring expenses was an amount spent on feeding the ‘faqirs, travelers and passers by’—attached to her estate in what the collector thought was an akira (correctly akhara, or monastic lodge)—as well as in paying for their particular forms of penance and commemoration.
Since renunciation was that of a Vedic ritual of commemoration, the rituals by which ancestors of such renunciants were commemorated constituted parallel but antithetical worlds without a uniform, coherent or singular form. With regard to Saiva renunciants, a set of practices which had come to resemble Vedic rituals of mortification were called ghat-utsarga or dedication of a water-bearing pot. According to later local scholars, these rituals were performed in the hottest month of the year (Chaitra in the lunar calendar), and the central performance required all Saiva sannyasis to abrogate their particular initiatory lineages (gotra) and live together as a penitent collective, subsisting on fruit and sweetmeats instead of cooked food, and observe celibacy for a full month.Footnote 93 Collectively this set of ritual practices came to be called charak (after the chakra, or circle through which the sun moved in a planetary circuit) and gajan. Janaki, the widowed zamindar of Mahisadal, paid for the month-long observation of the entire collective, as she did for her own personal familial rituals of commemoration. This was perhaps the reason why Saiva brotherhoods chanted eulogies to Janaki when they gathered for their annual festival (gajan), even into the early twentieth century.Footnote 94 In terms of affiliation then, at least one widow prioritized these mercantile monastics immediately after her own natal kin. Furthermore, the expenses reveal a more expansive sense of community than that built upon either bloodline or descent. Though an orthodox Brahman widow, technically bound by the rules of ritual conduct, she had sponsored the activities of men in a parallel world of anti-Vedic ritual practices.
The Company's tax-collecting officials considered such investments ‘wasteful expenses’; from the zamindari widow's perspective, however, it might have been a shrewd investment of resources with an eye to long-term dividends. After all, Janaki's expenditure on these men's rituals also ensured that they returned regularly to her estates, settled them, and expanded both their military and agrarian potential. Janaki regularly housed and fed such itinerants. The list of annual expenses (in addition to the perennial expense above) includes a substantial sum (of Rs 3,942) spent on what would have been the equivalent of a rest-house. These were the constructions that earlier scholars simply discussed as ‘temples’ and failed to incorporate into economic history. The English tax collector defined the word ‘durumsallah’ (or dharamsala) as ‘food to faquirs, Travellers &ca passing by when there is a Tacoor or Image’. Yet another sum of Rs 450 was simply ‘disbursements to faquirs’ and yet another Rs 1,190 was spent on enabling sannyasis to travel to the annual bathing ritual at Gangasagar (off the Bay of Bengal). The route that such sannyasis, pirs, and faqirs took tallied closely with the circuits of the commodities and cash. In the expense accounts, they show up as points along a north-south axis where money was sent, sometimes in the form of salt from the khalaris on the coastal marshes of her estate, with itinerant sannyasis and faqirs, to the Himalayan foothills. So she sent about Rs 1,135 rupees for the worship of Kiritesvari, one of the oldest Sakta deities, who was housed in a shrine in the village of Kiritkona, on the banks of the Bhagirathi, near Murshidabad.Footnote 95 Another Rs 1,750 rupees was sent for the worship of the Vaisnava deity, Jagannath, living in what is listed as ‘Purushottam Chattra Orissa’, the full name for the modern town of Puri. A much smaller sum, about Rs 300 rupees, was sent to the Saiva complex at Deogarh, known as the Baidyanath Dham (currently in a region called Jharkhand in Bihar, and known in officialese as ‘Santhal Parganas’), and triple that amount—Rs 950—to the goddess shrine at Kalighat, Calcutta.
An identical dispersal can be noticed in Bhavani's expenses. Though she lived in northern Bengal (currently in Bangladesh), from 1753 she sent annual sums of money (Rs 302) to the abbot (mahanta) of a lineage of Vaisnava monks, Srinivas Acharyya of Purushottampur (modern Puri, Orissa).Footnote 96 Among the obligations she inherited from her husband was the requirement to send similar sums to other mahanta akharas in Murshidabad and Orissa.Footnote 97
No different from her contemporary female zamindar in Rajshahi, the Brahman widow, Janaki, in coastal Bengal also maintained an ongoing relationship with the Sufi orders. Thus her account books show that another substantial sum (of Rs 1,391) went to ‘Pirrans, or offering at the tomb of a deceased famous Mussulman in order to support the charges of this Tomb and those who attend at it’. It is hard to pinpoint exactly which place is indicated by this reference. The title ‘Piran-i-Pir’ was usually given to Ghousal Azam, Hadrat Shaykh Abdul Qadir Jilani (d. 583/1208 CE) from whom the Qadiri order of Sufis trace their school of learning. No shrine by that name was known in Hughli in the eighteenth century, but such a shrine existed in Malda, where a fair by that name is held in the present day. These sums to widely dispersed sites consistently place this Brahman widow's zamindari management at the fulcrum of a network of monastic sites, fairs, and shrines that made up monastic geographicity.
Dawn of coverture: the exchange of partnership for wardship and invisibility of women's investments
The first trade item over which the Company and the late Mughal administration in Bengal clashed was salt. In 1758, a Company boat carrying salt was stopped at Hughli. The provincial faujdar explained that it was because the passport (dastak) the boat carried was outdated; he was prepared to write a new dastak if the Company's men paid the sum that all salt traders paid to the government's treasury.Footnote 98 Both the Mughal emperor, Shah Alam, and his deputy in Bengal, Mir Qasim, were keen to preserve the older partnerships and cultural geographies involved in the internal trades in salt, tobacco, and other goods consumed locally. Since 1760, however, the private merchants of the Company had acquired shares in, and had then begun to compete with, the older internal trades in salt, betel-nut, tobacco, and lime.Footnote 99 Though the Court of Directors had expressly prohibited the servants of the Company from this private trade, the grant of Diwani to the Company in 1765 enabled the same officials to ignore the Court, raise private saltworks, and charge taxes on the salt from local merchants who were buying it for further sales.
After October 1765, the same officials who had loaned money to the zamindars and their servants with the consent of the governor and Council in Calcutta, also proceeded to use the English courts established in Calcutta to recover their loans.Footnote 100 The English collectors, in the capacity of private traders, were determined to recover the loans, with interest, from their debtors, the zamindars, or annex the lands that many had kept as security against such loans. It is hard to disentangle the ways in which Indian financiers in turn shored up this structure of private traders and financiers organized under the Company. However, it led to some extraordinary appeals to English law, especially to exceptional exercises of English debtor's law against the Mughal-era zamindars. For instance, a servant of the Company, a Mr Lushington, having loaned money to the zamindar of Nadia ‘five years ago’, proceeded to have him arrested by order of the Mayor's Court of Calcutta (set up to adjudicate commercial disputes among Europeans).Footnote 101 As a result, and in a very pointed move by the Company's tax-collecting regime, revenue circulars sent to provincial collectors authorized them not to ‘recognize’ as legitimate any of the loans that the zamindars had taken from other lenders prior to 1765.
Monastic business groups, many of which were involved with widow-led zamindari estates, resisted the layman private trader-cum-Company official networks. Economic competition between rival banking and mercantile networks began to erupt most obviously at particular times in the harvest-collecting, selling, and revenue-collecting calendar when the monastic moneylenders came to reclaim on their loans. As in 1773 in Rangpur, Dinajpur, Midnapur, and almost all parts of Bengal and Orissa, when sannyasi faqirs tried to collect what they were owed, a watchful and canny Warren Hastings understood the strength of prior bonds that tied the monastic's client to them: this was what he called ‘the infatuation of the zamindars and inhabitants’.Footnote 102 Invested Company officers were thus fully sensitive to the need to dissolve these partnerships, and reconstitute the banking and the finance sector entirely. Thus, as an official note about the sannyasis in 1780 put it, ‘we conceive them to be persons who have settled in the lands for the purpose of accumulating riches by usurious and unlawful practices’.Footnote 103
Conflicts between the Company and its rivals then were not about two different conceptions of markets. The bankers, traders, and merchants alike caught up in these conflicts on both sides were Mughal. For instance, among the many merchants and financiers who were business partners of the Company from the outset were men such as Gokul Ghoshal and Nabakrishna Deb (Clive's Indian moneylenders) and Krishnakanta Nandi or ‘Cantoo Babu’ (for Warren Hastings). These men also lent money at various rates of interest to Indian tax collectors to enable them to meet the Company's demands for taxes in cash or goods. For instance, Gokul Ghoshal had loaned money to salt producers in Hughli so that by 1771, he could expect to earn back in principal and interest a sum the Company valued in pounds sterling as 159,196.Footnote 104 This sum would count as a debt due on the revenue collections of the district of Hughli. Similarly, in Burdwan, Nabakrishna Deb loaned about 9 lakhs of rupees to the rani in the course of 1778–79.Footnote 105
Such lenders counted on the absolute guarantee of Company armies acting on their behalf for the returns of their loans. The Company officials appear to have reciprocated with legislation that has been inaccurately attributed to ‘Brahman’ pandits with knowledge of Sanskrit. The case of Tamluk and Mahisadal in 1773 is worth referring to again for this reason. The contractor who collaborated with the Company officers, Ramcharan Roy, demanded that the widowed women (Janaki in one, and Santoshpriya and Krisnapriya, in the other) be retired from managing their inherited estates. But he never once referred to ‘Hindu law’. The English officers nevertheless resolved to ask Sanskrit-knowing pandits assembled in Calcutta that year to resolve this ‘according to the laws of the Gentoos’. Four specific questions were asked of these scholars, the second of which was directly related to the validity of female succession to zamindari estates. The pandits were emphatic in their reply: when a zamindar died, leaving ‘neither son nor wife, nor grandson nor great-grandson, then the daughter inherited the zamindari’.Footnote 106 In other words, they gave priority to widows’ inheritance and then to the daughters of a patrilineage. In 1781, other such learned men—‘Bhattacharjees or Pandits’—were found upholding a widow's claim to inherit all the property and lands of her dead husband in preference to the claims of the dead man's brother.Footnote 107 Eighteenth-century Brahman pandits did not authorize the infantilization of adult women. Aspiring and emergent moneylenders did. Their reasons had little to do with theology, and everything to do with rates of interest, profits, and commercial gain.
The Indian financiers who worked for the private traders and officials of the Company in 1750–1800 ensured the passing of legislation by the Company's council in Calcutta that eclipsed women's visible economic authority. Nabakrishna, an emerging big banker who loaned money to both British officers as well as to the widowed rani of Burdwan, represents these convergences. In 1780, when a major rebellion against Company rule occurred in Banaras, the mother of Tej Chand at Burdwan took the opportunity to remove herself, her 16-year-old son, and a significant number of revenue contractors loyal to her to Amboa, the estate of the most senior women of the Burdwan household. This was a site which could not be breached by Company armies without a serious battle. This move hampered the creditor, Nabakrishna, from collecting the crops and cash that would have constituted the returns on his investment. He complained to his patrons in the Company's government.Footnote 108 The latter, noting the enormous investment in the province, thought it would be ‘impolitic and improper’ to leave the management of the province to a recalcitrant woman and her favoured counsellor, Ramkanta Ray. So they sent a military guard to surround the women's residence at Amboa (Kalna) and demanded that she send her son back to Burdwan, where he would be taught to behave appropriately. With a police guard on the household of women, all the collections in their estates were threatened.
The whole house of cards came tumbling down because all of the women in that household had taken similar loans, including some from Englishmen in their dual capacity as merchants and tax collectors. For instance, a combination of attorneys (including the one-time president of the Bengal Council, Henry Vansittart, and members of the governing council such as P. M. Dacres) wrote to Warren Hastings in order to recover huge sums they said they had loaned to the female zamindars in Burdwan.Footnote 109 Already aggrieved by one female-centred bureaucracy, the Committee of Revenue resolved to end women's managerial authority over their estates once and for all. The Committee (made up of the next president of the Board of Revenue, John Shore, among others) wrote of the ‘great embarrassment which occurs in the course of our business’ from the circumstances of the ‘minority or sex of the zamindars’.Footnote 110 The Committee informed the governor-general, Warren Hastings, that zamindars, when they were young or females, were ‘especially incapable of managing their own concerns’, and their estate managers usurped all the collections instead of delivering them to the Company's government.Footnote 111 Though ideas of female incompetence might have been discussed privately earlier, they were only given institutional form for the first time in 1782. Colonial officials thus articulated principles of coverture taken from English common law, and smuggled them into the making of Regulations to establish what they called ‘a Zamindari Daftar’. This office was formally called the Court of Wards from 1783.
‘Wardship’, as Levine puts it, was a polite legalistic description of the divestment of enemies’ wealth.Footnote 112 A relic of an older monarchical system, it had been revived by Queen Elizabeth I and the Stuarts to contain ambitious peers and to reward favourites.Footnote 113 At the end of the eighteenth century, Company government brought wardship and coverture to contain those polities headed by women in partnership with monastic lineages who were unwilling to compromise with the Company. Examples of such partnership were everywhere. Rajshahi was merely one. Company officers suspected Bhavani of having actively aided the rebels in Banaras. They complained of her collusion with the Sufi faqirs in their pre-emptive collections of harvests, of her conniving at getting the tax collectors of the Company's government beaten up by the cultivators and tenants of Brahman-owned (brahmottar) lands in her estates, and of refusing to surrender them to Company's judicial officers.Footnote 114
The peculiar androcentrism of estate management that was demanded by the Company after 1782 was officially sealed by 1790. That year, the governor-general of India established that ‘every zamindar or taluqdar who is a minor or female was to be declared incapable of having any concern whatever in the management of lands paying revenue immediately to government and that no engagement thereof be contracted with any zamindars and taluqdars under this description’.Footnote 115 At the same time, all zamindars’ rights to levy, collect, and redistribute earnings from the imposts and tolls (sair) were also compulsorily handed over to the office of the European collector—and through him, the collector's favoured nominees.Footnote 116 Collectively, these measures appeared to have been pointed at eroding strategic aspects of the partnerships between female zamindars and monastic men.
With the women's descent into ‘wardship’ of the colonial state, the very buildings through which they had expressed their relationships of trust were demolished. British collectors, apparently appointed to ‘protect’ these women's rights against their male bureaucrats, in some instances simply removed all traces of these women's investments. The collector of Dinajpur, George Hatch, for instance, took away ‘several lacks of bricks belonging to the Rannee [of Dinajpur] which were designed for building a pagoda to receive an Idol’.Footnote 117 Only humble brick builders, masons, and labourers at various construction sites described the buildings that had been thus destroyed to their foundations, leaving no trace at all. For instance, an overseer of construction called Hetu spoke of some 60–70,000 bricks torn down by the collector of Dinajpur from what he called a ‘resting house’ by a tank (Ramsagar). The rest-house had been 13 cubits high and 15 cubits in length (approximately 20 feet high and 23 feet long), so a fairly large, hall-like room. It had been destroyed to its very foundations. Neither the shrine, nor its attached rest-house for itinerant males remained.
Yet this Hindu woman's construction was hardly alone in its dissolution. Even more ancient masjids and their attached madrasa and khanqahs established by long deceased Mughal nobles experienced a similar fate. Some were demolished in order to be reconstituted or remade into colonial and lay institutions. In 1790, the widow of Siraj-ud-daula, the governor of Mughal Bengal defeated in 1757, lamented that the ‘houses’ in the sacred complex built by her father-in-law in Patna were being pulled down.Footnote 118 At least one of these ‘houses’ was occupied by the colonial collector of Customs.Footnote 119 From Dacca, the Shi‘a nawab reported that the small bazar with 20 shops which had been endowed for the upkeep of the tomb of his mother had been taken over by the local collector.Footnote 120
As the colonial government established a growing monopoly over all markets and over all tolls, the public memory of women's wealth invested in the sacred-commercial complexes began to fade. Instead of remembering the moment at which British coverture laws were smuggled into Company regulations, and transformed recalcitrant wealthy adult women into ‘wards’ of colonial legal institutions, nineteenth-century commentators as well as their successors bundled these figures into a large, faceless and anonymous group of women who were ‘figures of suffering’.Footnote 121 Historians in the late twentieth century trying to reconstruct this past were led to hold Hindu and Muslim theologies responsible for this condition, guided by an official Orientalism already hostile towards the managerial and mercantile ‘Brahmans’, sannyasis, and faqirs and their partnerships with women holders of estates and women of business. Whether it was in the history of land-revenue collections or in histories of business, these women-centred partnerships disappeared from view across the entire monastic geographic network.Footnote 122 The conjoined invisibility of female patrons as economic partners of monastic men constituted a heart of darkness in subsequent post-colonial and feminist historiography. Art historians who came upon the last surviving traces of buildings from a long-dead monastic economy also thus came upon the ‘temples’ and could not see the commerce that had existed around these sites long ago.
Conclusion
There are some methodological, conceptual, and historiographical gains to revivifying that outline of monastic commerce in which elderly women partnered with non-kin men in the transition from Mughal economies to colonial capitalism in the eighteenth century. Female sponsors, even as they appeared as worshipful devotees, remained economic actors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially when they used their wealth for pious construction projects and rituals. Both buildings and ritual performances soldered particular monastic networks to territorially specific nodes in the landscape: these nodes in turn sustained a regular flow of goods and people. These groups of monastics and women constituted significant lineages of ‘trust’, a relationship of non-kin partnership that renders the category ‘hetero-normative’ more capacious and definitely more robust than has been usually allowed in Western European feminist scholarship. Non-kin partnerships between immobile women and mobile monks enable us to render the history of ‘Hindu households’ in terms more complex than studies of sexual relationships between such partners might have allowed.
Hetero-normative ‘couples’ of the kind alluded to in this article were as significant for the history of Hinduism in the eighteenth century as they were for the economic circuits within which salt, money, goods, and services circulated in the period before the 1780s. Though future research will determine whether or not such lineages of trust were specific to zamindari women or more generally shared across merchant-banking households in the period, what is clear from the records surveyed is that the private trades of the Company officials in the eighteenth century mirrored those of the monastic moneylenders and merchants. The only difference was the legislative and military might which eventually tipped the scale: Company officers secured the official authority to pass legislation to tame their rivals. These Company officers were laymen, often threatened by the women-centred trust networks in salt and silk trades, and in moneylending. It was under their watch that regulations were passed that chipped away at their rivals’ networks. This was where the importation of British coverture laws and wardship merged with the attempt by Company officials to expand Company-run trade through the structure of collection of internal tolls and taxes (sai’r). Thus the history of colonial policies between 1784 (Pitt's India Act) and 1790–93 (Decennial-Permanent Settlement), while simultaneously a story of the masculinization of estate-management, also became the story of impoverishment of the multiple aymadars and holders of madad-i-ma’ash grant holders hitherto sustained by income from zamindari imposts (sai’r). As the income on which older partnerships had worked was gradually diminished, so was women's authority in the management and investment of the remaining wealth.
The gradual invisibility of women's infrastructural investments was thus tied to commercial conflicts between Company-centred and women-centred networks in the eighteenth century. This decay left large gaps in the study of art history in the twentieth century. The absence also shaped the hesitation of economic historians to place women in the histories of infrastructure in economic terms and, most important, to nuance these investments as women's work. Having stumbled on a historically created fiction of ‘women's invisibility’, all of us were led to treating the historical result as the operation of ‘religious law’ when it was not.
